Camping

We went camping this weekend with some friends from church. It was raining, which always seems to be the case when we go camping. But despite that we had fun. Actually the biggest problem was the cold not the rain. We only have one sleeping bag which we were attempting to share along with some other blankets. It didn't work so well. So we've determined for the third or fourth time that we are going to get new sleeping bags. We kept pretty dry except for poor Doug who woke up wondering why his feet were so cold only to find that the one leak in our tent was dripping directly on his toes. Sad day.

Here's Doug making pancakes for breakfast.

These are the Stewarts and the Grants (at least some of them) who we went camping with. The Stewarts are new in our ward so it was nice to get to know them. You can see our green tent and white ride in the background.

We camped at Elk Neck State Park in Maryland which is our favorite place to camp around here. It's right on the Chesapeake Bay so you can camp and hike right next to the water. It was really cloudy but still pretty. We were hoping that the most of the leaves would have turned because it is so pretty there in the Fall, but for some reason a majority of the trees were still green.

There is a lighthouse at the park that you can climb up, and a really nice hike along the bay to get to the lighthouse. Doug and I think we are going to make this Fall camping trip to Elk Neck a yearly tradition. Last fall we went with Shana, and our friends Derek and Justin.

The lighthouse is on a big cliff. Since it's so high up you get a great view of the bay. All in all we had a great time, especially since we made some new friends. Next week I will have pictures of my visit to Seattle. We hope everyone is doing well!

ROTORFEST 2008!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Saturday we went to Rotorfest at the American Helicopter Museum in West Chester. Doug got six free tickets from work so we went with Lizzie, Johnny, Bekah, and Abby (Abe was on a 50 mile bike ride). Rotorfest is all about helicopters (as you probably figured out) and here we are inside one.


There were about ten helicopters there that you could go into including a bunch of the huge ones that the army uses. Here are the girls inside of one of the really big ones.

And one of the really small ones.


Johnny inside a government helicopter. This one wasn't an army helicopter and we thought it was probably used to transport politicians and stuff like that.


There was also an air show with parachuters and different aircraft showing us what they could do. After we had checked out the helicopters and watched the air show we got lunch and then went inside the museum for some refuge from the unseasonable heat. Here we are on our way back to the car. There were a couple of helicopters in front of the museum that you weren't allowed to get into but they were pretty cool. This one that they are standing in front of is a helicopter that was invented by the guy that started the company that Doug works at now.


Two helicopter nerds.

Our Weekend

Well there's not tons new going on with us but we did have a great General Conference weekend. Saturday morning I went to an open house at Chestnut Hill College so we got to Conference late. We enjoyed both sessions and are very happy about the Temple being built here, which I learned about from Ryan because we were late to the session. Saturday evening while Doug and all the other boys were at Priesthood Session we had our traditional girls party which was a lot of fun. We had delicious, healthy snacks: homemade hummus and guacamole with chips, popcorn, and homemade applesauce. Mom was saying how much Ann would have liked out party this year because we were so healthy. We missed her and all our other girls that have moved away :( The girl party is slowly shrinking in size. We watched an old version of Pride and Prejudice which had Lawrence Olivier in it, and that was fun. Sunday we went to Mom and Dad's ward for Conference and had the classic meatball sandwiches between sessions (delish as usual). Then Doug and I went on a walk to Mill Grove which is a wildlife preserve near the church. Here's some pictures we took:

Doug posing for a model shot

Mill Grove

We are actually at the ruins of the "mill" of Mill Grove here but it wasn't a
very cool background so we took a picture in the opposite direction

The woods at Mill Grove

So all in all life is going good. We love and miss you all! Please keep us updated on everything that's going on in your lives.

Shana's Birthday

Shana turned 22 this past week. YAY! Mom and Dad had a birthday dinner for her at their house on Sunday.

Mike's 24th birthday was the day before Shana's so we sang to them both.

The cake was certainly big enough for two birthdays. It was a delicious German Chocolate Cake made by Liz. Aren't they a cute couple?

Doug and I chillin' on the couch.

Shana and Mike chillin' on the couch.

After dinner Lizzy played the piano for a little while people danced.

Johnny preferred dancing with Melissa :)

My Life In Hell Is Over

Ok maybe I'm being a bit dramatic. But the truth is on Saturday I took the GRE and my life can finally resume some normalcy. I was spending a lot of my extra time studying for that test and it seems to have paid off. I got a 1280 which didn't quite reach my goal of 1300 but it should be good enough for both of the schools I'm applying to. When I got home from the test Doug and I decided to go out to get our last Rita's of the season. It's not exactly in our diet but I learned in my Psychology class that the brain runs on glucose and since I had just used my brain so much I figured that it needed to be replenished if I wanted to have normal brain capacity for the rest of the day.

Yum!!!

So far my favorite by-product of this new diet we're on is that I made sushi at home for the first time. The recipe that I got from the book used brown rice so it's still really healthy. And since sushi is pretty much Doug's favorite thing to eat he's pretty happy too :)

Missy This One's For You

The Big Read is a National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six. The bold ones are the ones I've read.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter - J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare---hmmm, I'm not sure if I've read them ALL
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy--(does half count?)
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding--Is this seriously on here?
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt-
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo